Should We Allow More Homes to Be Built in Existing Neighborhoods?
By Amy Dain, Noviembre 28, 2022
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Where should new multifamily housing go? This is a fundamental question facing 175 communities across eastern Massachusetts as they work to implement a new law intended to address the region’s housing shortage. The law requires cities and towns served by Greater Boston’s public transit agency, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority), to enact zoning that allows multifamily housing near transit.
If history is any indication, communities will seek to locate new housing away from existing residential neighborhoods. In recent decades, the largest portion of new housing in Greater Boston has been built in isolated areas on municipal and metropolitan peripheries. As an example, the town of Wellesley approved the construction of a 262-unit complex called The Nines—separated from almost all of the town by Interstate 95 and located on a spit of land tucked between the highway, state Route 9, and the Charles River. The towns of Needham and Stoneham permitted similar “across the interstate” developments, and other examples abound.
The next largest portion of residential permitting has come in commercial areas. As “smart growth” caught on in the new millennium, many cities and towns added one or two small- or medium-sized multifamily buildings to their downtowns. These properties are very close to residential neighborhoods, but not right in them. Zoning for mixed-use developments along decaying strip mall corridors has also been gaining support. Thus, we see projects on Newton’s Needham Street, Bedford’s Great Road, Salem’s Highland Avenue, Swampscott’s Vinnin Square, and many other less-than-loved “stroads.”
For many communities, preserving the status quo of existing neighborhoods has been an explicit priority, even as the housing crunch has intensified. A few years ago, the city of Weymouth rezoned a commercial corridor for mixed-use multifamily housing, drawing the zoning district surgically to avoid development near existing residential neighborhoods. Wellesley’s 2018 Draft Unified Plan explains that participants in public meetings saw commercial, office, and industrial areas as the most acceptable locations for multifamily housing; not residential districts. In fact, my review of local master plans across 100 cities and towns showed no movement to upzone residential neighborhoods, other than by allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which appear to have relatively popular support.
Given the political resistance to changing residential neighborhoods, developing housing in other areas is not without merit. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the regional planning agency, recently analyzed more than 3,000 strip malls and shopping centers across Greater Boston, and estimated that such sites could accommodate 124,000 new homes. Between those areas and various office parks and industrial lands, Greater Boston could raise enough residential towers and townhouses to end bidding wars, giving renters and buyers the upper hand, without changing existing residential neighborhoods.
However, the strategy of rezoning exclusively commercial and industrial areas assumes that the only goal is housing production. Metropolitan growth policy also needs to consider transportation, the environment, local economies, quality of life, and equity.
The transit-oriented development (TOD) paradigm at the heart of Massachusetts’s new MBTA Communities Zoning Law imagines a region defined by a network of walkable, dense hubs that are well-connected by roads, walkways, bike lanes, bus lanes, train lines, and ferry routes. Under this scenario, people will spend less time in traffic; convenient region-wide mobility will be accessible to all residents, including those without cars; carbon emissions will go down; more people will have access to the region’s best opportunities; and our collective well-being and resilience will improve.
One of Greater Boston’s most prominent strengths is that it was built as a network of urban villages well connected by trains and streetcars before automobiles began dominating urban design. The framework for the vision of well-connected “great neighborhoods” is already on the ground. The metropolitan area is crisscrossed with village centers and downtowns that contain pharmacies, libraries, restaurants, cafes, civic institutions, schools, playgrounds, public greens, quirky shops, and transit stops.
If we write off as unchangeable all residential neighborhoods adjacent to these great hubs, then we make it harder to achieve the combined goals of an abundance of housing and sustainable, equitable settlement patterns. There is great demand in Greater Boston for “missing middle” housing that fits between single family-houses-with-yards and bigger apartment/condo complexes. For development of smaller scale multifamily housing to serve many people and make a difference in the market, it has to be allowed in more places.
A residential neighborhood in Waltham, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.
The project to create more housing in the Boston area will involve a combination of strategies, including significantly more building on main streets and the currently car-oriented corridors that radiate out from them; continued building on some isolated parcels on municipal edges; and incremental increases in density near connected, walkable hubs—i.e., in existing residential neighborhoods. Significant development on isolated parcels and strip mall corridors should be accompanied by infrastructure redesign to create connected, walkable hubs.
As they consider different development scenarios that meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities zoning law, leaders and residents will need to weigh the politics and pros and cons of dense zoning in commercial and industrial areas, against zoning for small-scale multifamily housing in neighborhoods. Their deliberations will be part of a larger national debate about how regions should grow.
Many people will be anxious about the possibility of multifamily development next to their homes. They’ll worry about traffic and parking, property values, architecture, noise, privacy, and all sorts of things. But we could just as well associate new housing with the chocolate chip cookies the future residents might bake for block parties, the leadership they might take on local issues, and the purple pansies they might plant out front in big happy planters. We could think of the joy, stability, and safety that new neighbors will gain in, and contribute to, our neighborhoods.
Humans are perhaps wired to protect against threats more than to revel in visions of possibility, but we are also well equipped to plan ahead, together. We should plan for a just and sustainable future with abundant housing in wonderful, connected neighborhoods—and reform local zoning accordingly.
Amy Dain is an independent consultant in public policy research and writing. Her focus is on urban and suburban planning and housing policy. She has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on zoning and approval processes for multifamily housing in the Greater Boston area.
Image: Construction in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.
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2023 C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship Program
The Lincoln Institute's C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship Program assists PhD students whose research complements the Institute's interest in property valuation and taxation. The program provides an important link between the Institute's educational mission and its research objectives by supporting scholars early in their careers.
The application deadline is 6:00 p.m. EST on March 3, 2023.
Zoning may not be something most people think about every day. But behind the scenes, local land use rules have been blocking affordable housing, hindering climate action, and exacerbating racial segregation, according to advocates for reform.
This conversation comes at a time when at least 10 states are moving forward to modify zoning at the local level—to remove restrictions on multifamily housing development near transit stations, for example. The rationale is that there’s not nearly enough affordable housing, and local land use regulations skew toward single-family homes on large lots, which are inevitably more expensive. That’s just one example of the kind of overhaul being proposed.
“I would argue that zoning is the most significant regulatory power of local government because it [not only] governs where we can put housing and factories and parks and shops . . . but it actually has significant impacts on the economy, and even I think the very structure of our society,” said Bronin, who has been a leader in a zoning reform effort called Desegregate Connecticut.
Why all the attention to zoning now? Gray, who has been active in the organization California YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard), says many Americans are frustrated with the lack of affordable housing, and have been motivated to understand the factors behind that shortage.
“There’s a huge appetite from across the political spectrum for reform ideas here,” he said, as the affordability crisis intensifies not only in California but throughout the country.
The reform measures have included eliminating single-family-only zoning, clearing the path for modest increases in density where it is currently not allowed; lifting prohibitions on accessory dwelling units, such as carriage houses or apartments over garages; and reducing or eliminating excessive requirements to build parking at new developments, which drive up construction costs.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Shifting Gears
Why Communities Are Eliminating Off-Street Parking Requirements—and What Comes Next
By Catie Gould, Octubre 12, 2022
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Columbus, Ohio, invented the first known off-street parking requirement for an apartment building in 1923. After nearly a hundred years, the results are in, and they’re not good.
Last year, an assessment of the local zoning code—commissioned by the city as part of a comprehensive code revision process—concluded that off-street parking requirements were “not effective” and “often poorly matched to true parking demand.”
That mismatch has gotten worse over time. Today’s parking requirements in Columbus are far higher than their cousins from the city’s midcentury zoning code. In 1954, an apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units was required to have 100 parking spaces; today it has to have 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, nine required parking spaces became 34, in the 90 percent of the city not covered by special overlay districts. These ratios are out of step with the local market, leading builders to request parking reductions more than any other type of zoning variance. City and regional plans have recommended reducing parking requirements and making them more consistent.
Columbus is not alone. Across the United States, decades of similar parking requirements have led to a glut: researchers estimate that for every car in the country, there are at least three parking spaces—and some have suggested the number is closer to eight spaces.
This oversupply has created a host of problems: parking requirements can inflate housing costs, block buildings from being adapted to new uses, and contribute to sprawl, making additional driving (and parking) necessary. They create an administrative burden. And the impervious surfaces of parking lots increase the risk of flooding and contribute to the urban heat island effect.
But there is good news: of all the harms traditional zoning has inflicted on communities, parking requirements are the easiest to fix, said Sara Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission. Bronin was at the helm in 2017, when Hartford became one of the first cities in the United States to eliminate residential and commercial parking mandates. The year before, city leaders had tested the waters by eliminating requirements in the downtown area, a move that yielded new development projects and new proposals for reuse. “Every community should be eliminating their parking requirements,” Bronin said.
Each year, more cities are eliminating or reducing such mandates. In 2021, cities from Minneapolis to Jackson, Tennessee, eliminated minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes. In the week that this article was drafted alone, cities from Spokane to Chicago to Burlington, Vermont, rolled back parking mandates.
Communities might reduce their parking requirements because they are trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new businesses and development, accommodate population growth with space-efficient infill, or focus more on transit and walkability. Regardless of the reason, parking reform advocates say this land use regulation could finally be on its way out.
“We’re going to look back at this as just this weird, late-20th century aberration,” predicts Patrick Siegman, an economist and planner who has been studying parking since 1992, including as a partner at the national transportation planning firm Nelson Nygaard. “We created something wildly inefficient.”
Hartford Leads the Way
Like many industrial cities in the United States, Hartford saw dramatic population decline during the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, half of the people working in Hartford lived there, many walking or taking transit to jobs downtown; by 1980, less than a quarter of its workforce called the city home. Many white residents had fled for the suburbs and the overall population was declining. The repercussions of this demographic and economic shift are visible in the city’s bounty of parking lots: to accommodate the increase in car commuters, the city essentially paved over swaths of its downtown.
As historian Daniel Sterner put it, “Hartford is famous for having so much torn down.” Not even the city’s first skyscraper, built in 1912, survived the demolition boom. It was razed to make way for a taller office tower, but those plans were abandoned in 1990 as the country entered a recession. The prominent corner lot became, and remains, surface parking.
University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick and his team found that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of land dedicated to parking lots in the downtown business district tripled, nearly equaling the amount of land underneath all the adjacent buildings. “The increase in parking was part of the collapse of the city,” Garrick said. “It’s typical of a lot of American cities.”
Researchers have determined that the land dedicated to surface parking lots in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, tripled between 1960 and 2000. Credit: Christopher McCahill and Norman Garrick.
Even without the research, there was little debate that Hartford had an oversupply of parking. “I don’t think every city needs a full-on parking history, or parking analysis,” said Bronin. “Most people should be able to just look around and say, ‘there’s a lot of parking in this city.’”
The overabundance of parking came at a great cost for the city, Garrick’s team found in a report released in 2014. They estimated that the city was missing out on property tax revenue to the tune of $1,200 per downtown parking space, or about $50 million a year. That was a significant amount for a city whose downtown buildings were generating $75 million in annual tax revenue.
Attracting investment is critically important for Connecticut’s capital city—and particularly challenging. More than half of the city’s real estate is nontaxable, because the land is owned by the government or nonprofit institutions. The rest is subject to the highest property tax rate in the state. Eliminating parking requirements citywide is one way to create a more flexible, inviting environment for development.
“It’s easy to say we have no parking minimums, as opposed to ‘what zone?’,” said Aaron Gill, current vice chair of Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The biggest hurdle now is convincing developers they have new options, Gill said. He encourages developers to revisit parcels they might have discounted in the past, and to review how much parking is actually being used in previous developments.
The strategy seems to be working. The quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) has funded more than 2,800 new homes downtown since 2012, aiming to build a critical mass of residents to support retail and other services. Mike Freimuth, executive director of the CRDA, said the new zoning code has helped reduce costs and increased the use of existing parking garages.
One of the CRDA projects, Teachers Village, involved converting an office building that had been vacant for 20 years into housing for area educators. Thirty percent of the apartments were designated as affordable. Prior to the code change, more than one parking space would have been required for each unit, but the renovated building has only 18 underground parking spaces for 60 households. The spaces are leased separately from the apartments, saving money for those who don’t need a parking spot. According to estimates based on 2016 Census data, more than 30 percent of Hartford households don’t even own a car.
Other redevelopment projects have cut deals with adjacent parking garages, which are also adapting to the new world of remote work, to provide an off-street parking option for residents for an additional fee. Two derelict commercial buildings on Pearl Street, which Freimuth used to joke were the largest pigeon coops in the state, went that route when the buildings were renovated into 258 new homes. A few blocks away, a former Steiger’s department store is being converted into 97 new apartments with commercial space below.
The CRDA is also involved in an ambitious project known as Bushnell South, which aims to convert a 20-acre area dominated by surface parking into a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood with up to 1,200 apartments and townhouses, restaurants and retail, green space, and cultural attractions. The city was reviewing proposals from developers this summer with the goal of moving forward this fall. Although some developers have expressed concern that the city is building more residential space than the market can support, Freimuth is eager to proceed. “This land has been laying fallow for 50 years,” he told the Hartford Courant. “Why do we have to keep on waiting?”
Planners hope to convert an area of downtown Hartford currently dominated by surface parking into a mixed-use neighborhood known as Bushnell South. Credits: Mark Mirko/Hartford Courant, Goody Clancy/Bushnell South Planning Consortium.
The Benefits of a Citywide Shift
On the edge of downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, a building that had stood vacant for nearly 40 years now houses a local restaurant with a rooftop patio. Down the road, a formerly abandoned gas station is back in use as retail space. The reuse of these once-forgotten properties was made possible several years ago, when Fayetteville’s city council voted to remove commercial parking requirements citywide.
While most cities start with reducing parking mandates in a central business district, like Hartford did, planners in Fayetteville were fielding requests about properties throughout the city, and opted against defining a smaller boundary. At 44 square miles, Fayetteville is nearly 2.5 times larger than Hartford, with 70 percent of the population.
“As a city planner, you receive phone calls about what’s possible with this property,” Fayetteville planner Quin Thompson explained. “What I began to see was the same properties over and over again. Some of those properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t.” None of the parcels had enough space to meet the parking requirements in place at the time.
The planning staff approached the city council with the idea of eliminating commercial requirements citywide. Some of these properties were so constrained, they explained, it was impossible to imagine how they could be redeveloped under the current rules. They also said investors taking on the financial risk of a project were best suited to determine their own parking needs, and would act as a backstop even when the city was no longer regulating off-street parking spaces. In October 2015, Fayetteville’s city council agreed.
What happened next? “The buildings that I had identified as being perpetually and perhaps permanently unusable were very quickly purchased, redeveloped, and are in use right now,” said Thompson. “I can’t think of any that are still out there that I had used as case studies that haven’t been redeveloped.”
The elimination of commercial parking requirements in Fayetteville, Arkansas, made new projects possible, including the conversion of a long-vacant building into the busy Feed and Folly restaurant. Credits: Katie Mihalevich, Realtor®; Courtesy of Feed and Folly.
Thompson and his colleagues were right that the distinction between parking needs in a central city versus outlying neighborhoods can be arbitrary. In the lead-up to the removal of parking requirements in Edmonton in 2020, a citywide study of 277 sites found no clear geographic trend that related to how full parking lots were, even after factoring in variables like population density, walkability as measured by Walk Score, or drive-alone rate. Of all the sites surveyed, only 7 percent neared capacity at the busiest times of day. It was far more common for parking lots to remain half empty, as was the case for 47 percent of observed sites.
In Fayetteville and other cities, eliminating parking minimums citywide has had another benefit: reducing administrative work and freeing up city staff to work on other things. “One of the things you find in American cities is that they’ve got all of these college-educated planners, many of whom actually have graduate degrees, and what they’re doing is spending hour after hour processing parking variances,” explained Siegman.
Kevin Robinson was one of those planners, until he was hired as director of Planning and Development Services for Albemarle, North Carolina. To his surprise, the city had almost no parking requirements, having eliminated virtually all of them two decades prior. “However you came about it,” he recalls telling city officials, “I think you’re on the right track.”
Towns where he had worked previously had only reduced parking requirements in central business districts, not citywide. “From an administrative standpoint, it’s a heck of a lot easier to deal with,” said Robinson. “Quite honestly, a lot of times [parking minimums] are very arbitrary numbers,” Robinson said. Now that he no longer has to enforce them, he has more time to spend on other aspects of development—including a downtown parking plan. He has plenty of data to rebut complaints that there isn’t enough parking. Even at peak hours, public parking never gets more than half full, his heatmaps indicate.
Robinson acknowledges that eliminating parking minimums wasn’t a cure-all: “We are still seeing far more parking being built than is absolutely necessary.” (See sidebar to learn how the shift has played out in other cities.) Construction in Albemarle is picking up as people get priced out of nearby cities like Charlotte. In the last two years, this small city of 16,000 has approved permits for 3,000 new housing units, with another 1,000 in the works, including middle housing like duplexes and townhouses.
Robinson is nervous that the parking requirements, which were discarded at a time when the city wasn’t growing, might return as development accelerates. “I’m trying to keep them from going in that direction,” he said. His concerns aren’t unfounded.
When Mandates Make a U-Turn
It took almost a decade for a new apartment building with no parking to arrive in Portland after the city waived requirements near transit in 2002. The political backlash came more swiftly. As Portland’s rental market tightened, the city found itself with the second-lowest vacancy rate in the country in 2012. Apartment construction was booming, and buildings without off-street parking were becoming increasingly common.
Then controversy erupted. The epicenter was a 13-block section of Division Street, a car-oriented commercial corridor experiencing a building boom. By the time the issue made it to the front pages of Willamette Week, the local weekly paper, 11 new multifamily buildings were under development, seven with no parking at all.
A city-commissioned survey of 115 residents of new apartment buildings would show that 72 percent of the respondents owned cars, with the majority parking on neighborhood streets. Even though the same survey showed that the areas around the buildings had plenty of available parking, neighbors didn’t perceive it that way.
Mayor Charlie Hales, who had championed the removal of parking mandates as a council member in 2002, even floated the idea of instituting a building moratorium until the zoning code could be sorted out. Hales told Willamette Week that he had anticipated developers might build one parking spot instead of two, but hadn’t imagined banks would finance housing with no parking at all.
In response to the outcry, Portland’s city council reinstituted a parking requirement for multifamily developments with more than 30 units. Those larger buildings would need to provide one parking space for every three or four units, depending on the building size. “That was the strategic retreat,” Hales explained. “We decided to adjust our ideal slightly to a watered-down version in order to reduce the controversy.”
Hales, who is no longer mayor, still believes strongly in eliminating parking requirements. “There’s some things we really don’t need to regulate,” he said recently. “Minimum number of parking spaces is one of them.” Given the political pressure of the time, he has a hard time imagining how things could have worked out differently.
While supporters of parking mandates prevailed in that case, the matter was far from settled. Several years after the 2013 brouhaha, regulated affordable housing near transit regained its exemption from parking requirements, after rising rents and economic displacement prompted Portland to declare a housing state of emergency and elect a tenant advocate to city council. Portland adopted an inclusionary zoning policy that same year, requiring multifamily buildings to set aside units for affordable housing—and waiving residential parking requirements for those buildings.
Looking back, Portland activist Tony Jordan, who went on to launch the national Parking Reform Network, thinks the city was foolish to derail the housing construction wave. “Why would you do anything” to make developers think twice about investing in larger buildings, he asked. The way the code was written, adding one more unit to a 30-unit building came with “a penalty of six parking spaces, incentivizing builders to stay under the limit. “Even if we only lost 60 apartments,” he said, “that’s a housing subsidy that we just threw away—and for what?”
Communities with No Parking Minimums
According to the Parking Reform Network, the following communities do not have citywide minimum parking requirements (dates of implementation indicated when known). Learn more about these and other changes to U.S. parking mandates at www.parkingreform.org.
• California: Alameda (2021), San Francisco (2018), Emeryville (2019)
• Connecticut: Bridgeport (2022), Hartford (2017)
• Georgia: Dunwoody (2019)
• Indiana: South Bend (2021)
• Michigan: Ann Arbor (2022), Mancelona, Ecorse (2020), River Rouge (2021)
• Minnesota: Minneapolis (2021), St. Paul (2021)
• Missouri: Branson
• New Hampshire: Seabrook (2019), Dover (2015)
• New York: Buffalo (2017), Canandaigua, Hudson (2019), Saranac Lake (2016)
• North Carolina: Raleigh (2022)
• Tennessee: Jackson (2021)
• Texas: Bandera, Bastrop (2019)
• Alberta: Edmonton (2020), High River (2021)
Stopping Parking Spillover
When parking complaints bubbled up in Portland’s Northwest neighborhood in 2016, the city was ready to try a different strategy: directly managing on-street parking. A local parking advisory committee had petitioned Portland’s city council to apply the citywide parking requirements to the growing district, which had historically been exempted. But when a study showed that those regulations would have made 23 percent of newly constructed homes in the neighborhood illegal, the council opted to improve the district’s fledgling parking permit program instead.
“When city staff manage on-street parking properly, they can prevent that on-street parking from getting overcrowded with a 99 percent success rate,” said Siegman, who has spent much of his career studying spillover parking concerns. The problem, he said, is that almost no one has training in how to manage street parking in a way that is both effective and politically popular. On-street parking management is not part of the core curriculum for planners or transportation engineers.
“What you’re essentially doing with on-street parking spaces is taking a valuable resource that belongs to the public and setting up rights to determine who gets to use it,” said Siegman. Any hotel manager knows that once the keys are gone, there is no vacancy. Yet cities often hand out multiple residential permits for every street space, and wait until the problem is so bad that neighbors have to petition for curbside management. When a neighborhood has more drivers seeking permits than there are on-street spaces, there are a number of ways to ensure balance. Boundaries for a parking district could exclude new buildings or households with driveways, or restrict the number of permits to the street frontage of the lot—forcing developers and incoming residents to make a plan for storing cars off-site.
Left to the Market, How Much Parking Gets Built?
In Buffalo, New York, which struck down parking requirements in April 2017, a review of 36 major developments showed that 53 percent of projects still opted to include at least as many parking spaces as the previous code had required. The developers who did propose building less parking averaged 60 fewer parking spaces than the old minimum required, avoiding over eight acres of unnecessary asphalt and saving up to $30 million in construction costs.
Seattle saw similar results after eliminating parking requirements near transit in 2012. A study of 868 residential developments permitted in the following five years found that 70 percent of new buildings in areas not subject to parking requirements still chose to have on-site parking. Collectively, the new buildings included 40 percent fewer parking spaces than would have previously been required, saving an estimated $537 million in construction costs and freeing up 144 acres of land.
Siegman estimates the costs of setting up an effective parking permit program could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000—a bargain compared to the cost of building parking, which can run as much as $50,000 per space. “There are all kinds of different feelings about what’s fair,” Siegman said, “but you can often come to a solution that has durable majority political support.”
That’s what officials in Vancouver, British Columbia, did in 2017 to resolve crowded curbs in the West End. Despite 94 percent of residents having access to an off-street parking space, many still preferred to park on the street. Over 6,000 drivers had opted for the $6 a month permit for the chance to park in one of the 2,747 on-street spaces. When the city raised permit prices to $30 per month—more in line with what private garages charged—and installed more parking meters, curb congestion cleared up. Before that change, only one out of five blocks met the city’s standards of being less than 85 percent full at the busiest time of day. Within two years of the pricing adjustments, all of the blocks measured below that threshold, making it far easier to find a parking space.
The Next Wave of Parking Reform
More and more, champions of eliminating parking mandates are getting elected to offices and planning commissions, according to Jordan, of the Parking Reform Network. “One person can really get the idea and push it through,” he said. The growing number of cities that have taken this deregulatory action provides political cover for policy makers who have been hesitant to go first.
But parking reform advocates say change should and will happen beyond the local level. Since “the perceived benefits of instituting parking regulations [have been] almost entirely local,” Siegman said, he thinks almost all of the productive reform to get rid of minimum parking laws is going to come from regional, state, or national governments.
A wave of legislation against parking mandates has been gathering momentum on the West Coast. In 2020, Washington State quietly capped excessive parking requirements near transit for market-rate and affordable housing. California’s third attempt to limit local parking requirements near public transit succeeded in September with the signing of AB 2097. That came on the heels of another statewide rollback in Oregon, where a state land use commission struck down parking mandates for projects near transit, affordable housing, and small homes across the state’s eight largest metro regions, which house 60 percent of Oregon’s population.
By July 2023, nearly 50 cities in Oregon will need to choose between wholly eliminating minimum parking requirements or implementing a suite of other tools to manage parking and comply with the new administrative rule. They are sure to have lots of company, as municipalities and states across the nation weigh the harm these regulations have caused against the 20th century dream of free and easy parking.
Aaron Gill, of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission, has some simple advice for jurisdictions considering removing parking minimums: “I would say just do it. Don’t waste time having a discussion as to if it’s going to work or not. The reality is we have way too much parking in this country.”
Catie Gould is a transportation researcher with the Seattle-based nonprofit think tank Sightline Institute.
Lead image: Fordham Heights, New York. Credit: krblokhin via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Zoning is often considered a timeless element of land policy and planning. And it is. Zoning originated in Asia more than three millennia ago. In those days, it was used to designate land uses behind city walls or to separate people by caste. The practice was adopted more recently in the United States to pursue similar ends. It is now one of the biggest impediments to sustainability in U.S. cities in the 21st century.
I’ve made my feelings about hyperlocal land control known for many years. A decade ago, on a panel with Nic Retsinas, then director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, I opined that home rule and local land use controls were “dinosaurs” that made it almost impossible to coordinate regional transportation planning and affordable housing efforts. Nic reminded me and the audience that powerful political and economic forces stood firmly in the way of land policy reform. And he noted that dinosaurs lasted for millions of years before becoming extinct—because of a random asteroid colliding with Earth, not natural selection.
But now, something almost as rare as a planet-changing asteroid is afoot in the world of land policy—bipartisan agreement. Numerous blue, red, and purple states have passed or are contemplating efforts to preempt local zoning so they can advance critical policy objectives. Why the sudden shift? Because many policy makers now understand that the national affordable housing crisis cannot be addressed without structural changes to the rules of the game. Other policy makers know that we cannot address one of the ugliest manifestations of zoning—spatial segregation by race and class—without aggressive affirmative action.
Although we are seeing bipartisan agreement on the need for reform, the motivations of policy makers are quite different. Advocates from the right argue that the housing crisis is an artifact of overregulation that stifles housing production. These critics believe zoning reform will unleash market forces that will confront the housing crisis by accelerating new production. Advocates from the left argue that we cannot build affordable housing in places we need it most because of land policies that have effectively excluded people based on race and income for generations, such as minimum lot sizes and bans on multifamily housing. Zoning reform will make it possible, they say, to build affordable housing in “high opportunity” places with good schools and decent jobs.
State preemption of local zoning is not new. In 1969, Massachusetts passed Chapter 40B, a measure that allows the state to override local zoning and approve mixed-income, multifamily developments in jurisdictions with little affordable housing. Although it has helped to promote some affordable housing development in some affluent suburbs, it was not a game changer, and few other states considered following suit, until very recently.
Now, some 10 states are ready to preempt local zoning to permit development of multiple housing units on lots that are currently zoned for single-family homes. These include the right to add accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to single-family lots in Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon, Maryland, California, and Washington; approving “middle housing,” two- to four-family townhomes, on lots zoned for single families in Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington, and Maryland; or complete preemption of local government efforts to prohibit multifamily housing development on single-family lots in Oregon, California, Virginia, Maine, and Washington. Massachusetts and California also recently mandated upzoning in “transit-rich” communities. Clearly, local control over land use is no longer sacrosanct.
Although zoning practice is thousands of years old, in the United States it is less than a century old, with a few exceptions. States began granting municipalities the power to dictate land uses in the 1920s, based on the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act drafted by the Department of Commerce in 1923. But what states giveth, states can taketh away. It is sometimes necessary for higher levels of government to supersede the decisions of lower levels of government to promote general welfare or address negative externalities that are artifacts of uncoordinated actions at lower levels. Too often, state efforts to override local governments are misguided; for example, when state policy makers curry favor from voters by imposing property tax limits. In the case of zoning, the need for state action is clearly defensible.
We should celebrate the fact that we are moving in the right direction—mustering the political will to take on a challenge that was, until very recently, considered impossible. But we still know less about zoning than we should. Each state, and often individual jurisdictions in a state, developed its own zoning conventions, which makes it extremely difficult to compare zoning practices among them. It also makes it almost impossible to understand the implications of zoning decisions on land values, development patterns, or how zoning reform might address big challenges like the housing crisis, spatial inequality, or urban sprawl. This too is changing.
Last year, a small team of visionaries at Cornell Law School, led by Professor Sara Bronin, produced the first Zoning Atlas for the State of Connecticut. Using spreadsheets, maps, and geographic information systems, the team documented, with impressive granularity, residential zoning practices in 180 jurisdictions with 2,622 zoning districts. Incredibly, this required reviewing more than 30,000 pages of text describing zoning practices—in one state!
This herculean task apparently was not a big enough challenge for this plucky band of researchers. The Cornell team recently launched an effort to build a National Zoning Atlas. Now, with a field-tested methodology for creating the Zoning Atlas in Connecticut, they have set out to crowdsource zoning data from the rest of the country using the same methods. So far, self-organized teams in 11 states are participating. When they succeed at building the national atlas—and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will do all it can to make sure that happens—a new era of land policy scholarship will arrive. Debates about the costs, benefits, and consequences of zoning reform will be informed by real data.
Zoning reform alone is not sufficient to solve the national housing crisis. But it is necessary. And we need to know a lot more about current zoning practices, and the potential benefits of improved zoning practice, to address the ills generated by decades of bad practice. A century of decentralized and isolated local control of land produced unacceptable levels of racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl that contributed to the climate crisis, and an almost unassailable affordable housing crisis. With the unprecedented alignment of political will with new tools and knowledge, possible solutions to this triple threat are closer than they have ever been.
George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Image: The interactive Connecticut Zoning Atlas is the first stage of a national effort to document zoning across the United States. Credit: National Zoning Atlas.